Bill 60 strips away…

Bill 60 strips away individual rights of people by undermining democracy and the public sector to favour private corporations while hiding behind the guise of progress of building homes and infrastructure.

Bill 60 enables the provincial government to seize power away from democratically elected municipalities to appointed ministers and is a blatant effort to consolidate power.

Once again, the Ontario Progressive Conservative government is targeting bike lanes and prioritizing car travel. This time instead of trying to remove bike lanes (since it was deemed unconstitutional), Bill 60 aims to prevent them from being installed entirely. Bill 60 states it will improve gridlock, community safety, and landlord-tenant frameworks, but it in fact will ruin them.

Gridlock
Schedule 5, “Prohibiting municipalities from reducing motor vehicle lanes when installing, implementing, or marking new bicycle lanes,” not only takes away power from local governments - the ones who really understand the neighborhood - but it does not address the existing traffic issue of too many cars on the road.

Bill 60 prevents alternative modes of transportation and will induce demand for car traffic. An effective solution to easing gridlock is creating affordable alternative modes of transportation from cars that are vastly connected throughout the province; this does not mean eliminating cars, but allowing for other modes to exist. Alternatives such as public transit (trains, buses, subways), bikes, scooters, walking, etc. If there were viable and affordable alternatives, it would allow for people to have options to travel, less cars on the road, and less gridlock.

There are so many other cities around the world that were formerly car dependent that improved their infrastructure to alleviate car traffic. Cities including, but not limited to, Copenhagen, Oslo, Paris, Seoul, Amsterdam, Bogota, even New York, Vancouver, and Montreal. Effective measures to reduce car dependency and gridlock included providing quality alternatives to private vehicles, discouraging excessive car use through congestion pricing, integrating transport and land use through mixed use zoning laws, etc.

Schedule 5 prevents the majority, if not all, of bike lanes to be installed since it cannot take away from motor vehicle lanes. This results in the creation of bike lanes to either not exist or take away from somewhere else like sidewalks, which is inadvisable since it is part of transportation and creates new dangers. If protected bike lanes do not exist, cyclists are forced to ride alongside traffic or on sidewalks, both are extremely dangerous for different reasons. In recent years, there have been several cases where children were seriously hurt or killed riding their bikes on the sidewalk due to car centric infrastructure.

Community Safety
There is evidence and studies of the adoption of protected bike lanes improving local economies and emergency response times.

The only way to improve cycling safety is to create safe infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians. Bill 60 makes it more difficult for safe infrastructure to be built, instead it prioritizes the speed of motor vehicles which increases danger for everyone.

Any argument of low bicycle ridership to prioritize car reliant infrastructure should be taken with a grain of salt. Even with poor bike infrastructure in most areas of Ontario, there is still an increasing number of people riding bikes. A wider range of people would ride more often if there was safer infrastructure, including promoting children independence by riding for school, parks, and visiting friends to adults by riding for commuting, shops, and health.

Landlord-Tenant Frameworks
The changes Bill 60 proposes weakens tenant rights and will exacerbate the homelessness crisis.

This bill removes the automatic month-to-month lease renewals, which will allow landlords to use fixed-term leases to circumvent rent controls and raise rent without limits between tenants.

The bill also reduces the time a tenant has to ask for a review of a Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) order from 30 days to 15 days and shortens the grace period for non-payment of rent, allowing a landlord to apply for eviction after only 7 days of non-payment, down from 14 days.

In addition, Bill 60 would reduce the circumstances under which a tenant receives compensation for a "no-fault" eviction (such as a landlord moving in).

These changes only make it more difficult to be a tenant for securing funding or legal support in a shorter period of time, which will lead to increased evictions and increased rent for the next tenant, resulting in even worse outcomes during a housing crisis.

Everyone deserves a place to live, unfortunately, Bill 60 makes it more difficult than it already is to afford a home. Instead, the bill benefits landlords profiteering off a basic human need, especially those renting out multiple properties. The commodification of housing amplifies the housing crisis for many while benefiting the wealthy few by constantly increasing housing costs.

Environmental Implications
In terms of environmental implications, by prioritizing the development of motor vehicle infrastructure, it does not leave room, physically and financially, for more environmentally friendly modes of transportation, such as cycling and public transit. By focusing on motor vehicle lanes, the induced demand will result in more cars on the road and air pollution. Especially in high density urban areas, cycling and mass transit has proved to be effective solutions throughout the world, but unfortunately Ontario has been falling behind in this area due to the lack of funding for public transportation in favour of car dependent infrastructure.

Regulatory Impact
Bill 60 forces municipalities to align with the proposed legislative requirements. While it states there are no further regulator burdens, limiting the democratically elected municipalities autonomy reduces overall democracy in the system. This takes away the power away from individuals and into the hands of the provincial government, setting a dangerous precedent of consolidating power.

Bill 60 should not be passed.